Saturday, April 03, 2010

It's a build designed for 5 or 10-man content. It brings two major buffs to the raid: 10% Attack Power and 20% Melee Haste. Both are very important buffs that may not be covered. It also has the full 20% melee slow debuff. Raid buffs are very important, and sometimes it's hard to get full coverage in a smaller group. It also brings a Hysteria to further boost melee damage.

Defensively, it includes Will of the Necropolis and Vampiric Blood. It doesn't have 5% dodge, but it does have 3% additional melee miss chance. That should be good enough for lower content.

It's a two-handed weapon build. It plays like a regular Blood build, only you use Obliterate instead of Death Strike, and you have to refresh diseases more often. It probably won't do as much threat as a pure Frost or pure Blood build would do.

It's a pretty interesting hybrid Blood/Frost build. In some ways, it makes the DK an enhancement shaman replacement, as you bring the buffs an enhancement shaman usually would provide (Strength of Earth Totem, Unleashed Rage, and Windfury Totem). Of course, if your group already has an enhancement shaman, there are probably better tank builds.

Posted by
Rohan

3 comments:

I'm not a fan of hybrid builds, at least not for progression content. There's a few odd choices in this build: runic power mastery, you're probably better off putting the points into Black Ice for a little more threat.Sudden Doom is an odd choice over Imp DS. Without points in Morbidity your DC's are going to be pretty weak.

You are lacking a hard-hitting attack: both Obliterate and DS are untalented. At least getting Imp DS would give some solid self-healing.

Hybrid builds tend to miss out on the talent synergy that a deep tree spec has. I'm paraphrasing Satorri from Tankspot here: with a deep tree spec your talents are no longer A+B+C, but rather AxBxC.

There's a reason you take Obliterate over Death Strike. Normal Obliterate with 2 diseases does about as much damage as Improved Death Strike, and since you have Annihilation you don't lose the diseases when you Oblit. Second, you get 3% more crit from Subversion and 5 extra Runic Power from Chill of the Grave. Plus you save 2 talent points.

As for Black Ice, that's an option, I suppose. It would improve Death Coils and diseases.

As for talent synergy, this build sacrifices personal power in exchange for raid synergy. 10% AP and 20% melee haste are huge buffs, especially for melee classes. In 10-man content, giving those buffs to the DPS might be more important than maximizing the tank's damage.